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PrePARe: Start Early
- 1. START EARLY Save time Image : Alan Cleaver on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alancleaver/ 4293345631/
- 2. Make a plan for how what you are going to do with your material (digital and analogue)… … both during the project and once it’s finished
- 3. Make plans to: STORE IT SAFELY SHARE IT EXPLAIN IT Colin_K on flickr: Cennydd via flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/colinkinner/ www.flickr.com/photos/cennydd/2687237902/ www.shareaholic.com/openshareicon 2200500024/
- 4. Get into good habits www.flickr.com/photos/jemsweb/4363548805/ By jemsweb on flickr: early in your research… Image: Beth Kanter www.flickr.com/photos/cambodia4kidsorg/ 260004685/ …it will save you time in the end
- 5. The perfect is the enemy of the good ~ Voltaire
- 6. Start Early • Make a plan for how you will manage your research material both during and after your research project • Consider how you will: – Explain it – Store it safely – Share it • Get into good habits early in your research • Ask for advice – Talk to repositories and data centres
- 7. Open Access Teaching Materials for Digital Preservation Produced by Anna Collins (2012) for the JISC- funded PrePARe project This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Editor's Notes
- Digital preservation might seem irrelevant, or not something that you have to think about until you get to the end of a project.BUT it’s A LOT easier to plan for how you are going to look after your digital material when you create it (or even before) than at the end. There are a number of reasons for this: you might forget why you made certain decisions about some of the material, there might even be things that you now can’t understand. Leaving it till the end might mean that it becomes someone else’s responsibility, but they will not understand your data as well as you do. You might have made decisions about how to store your material that make it hard to preserve it. Going back through lots of data and sorting it out will take time (possibly quite a lot of time) and you will probably be keen to move on to the next project.So planning to preserve right from the start will save you time in the long run.
- Planning will help your research in several ways:It can save you time (for example by minimising the need to re-collect data)It can act as a road map for your researchIt can save you money (for example by helping you decide on the most cost-effective safe way of storing data)It can help streamline collaborative work (as you will all have a common set of guidelines)It can help you focus on the key questions of your research
- These three areas will help with the long-term preservation of your research. Ask for more information![Note separate sets of slides are available on each of these areas.]
- Good habits to cultivate:Organise your data from the start. Exactly how you do this will depend on the norms in your discipline or research group, and personal preference. (The lego could have been organised by colour, but has been organised by type.) The system you use can affect how easy it is to find things. If your system mirrors your thought processes, this will probably help find information again later.Give your files sensible names; doing this when you save a file the first time takes hardly any time at all. Going back and renaming files takes a lot longer (and that’s assuming you don’t need to open them to find out what they are). Be particularly careful with files that are given names automatically, eg from digital cameras or experimental outputs, as these tend not to be meaningful in the long term. Back up regularly. Get into the habit early on so it is second nature. This also means that your back up will be comprehensive and there is less chance of missing an important file.Document, label and tag as you go. If you take measurements, what units were they in? What equipment did you use? What search parameters did you use on a database search? Who/what is in the photo, and when and why did you take it? Make sure spreadsheets have row and column labels. These sorts of things can seem obvious but can be surprisingly easy to forget, particularly after a few (3) years. And of course you should also document the less obvious things too! If in doubt on what to include, err on the side of too much rather than too little information.Be careful about using copyrighted material; get copyright clearance on third party copyrighted material as you go along (copyright clearance is necessary for any published work, including e-theses) and make sure the permissions for use are clearly associated with the relevant material. Also look out for alternative licenses (such as Creative Commons) and make sure you retain the necessary information to give appropriate attribution.Remember that these tips will make it easier and quicker for you to preserve your digital material AND make things easier for you as you work on your data! It’s a win-win situation!
- It is better to start off doing something than not to start at all. Don’t think that your plans have to be perfect – it almost certainly won’t be. And the very nature of research means that the unexpected can, and probably will, happen; and then you will need to re-evaluate your plan in response. “A good plan implemented today is better than a perfect plan implemented tomorrow” – George Patton.
- In summary: